The universe is about 13.8 billion years old, and its stars are arguably its most momentous handiwork. Astronomers studying the intricacies of star formation across cosmic time are trying to understand whether stars and the ...

Look at a galaxy, what do you see? Probably lots of stars. Nebulae too. And that's probably it. A whole bunch of stars and gas in a variety of colorful assortments; a delight to the eye. And buried among those stars, if you ...

Galaxies come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Some of the most significant differences among galaxies, however, relate to where and how they form new stars. Compelling research to explain these differences has been ...

The dazzling glow of young stars dominates images of the giant stellar nursery NGC 346, in the neighboring dwarf galaxy called the Small Magellanic Cloud. But this photogenic beauty is more than just a "pretty face."

Most stars with the mass of the sun or larger have one or more companion stars, but when and how these multiple stars form is one of the controversial central problems of astronomy. Gravity contracts the natal gas and dust ...

An international research team led by Chin-Fei Lee in the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA) has made a breakthrough observation with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), confirming ...

This image, taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), shows a patch of space filled with galaxies of all shapes, colors and sizes, many of which belong to the galaxy cluster SDSS J0952+3434.

Star formation is one of the most important research fields in astrophysics. This process, in which gravitational instabilities cause the collapse of gas to form more compact structures and finally stars, encompasses a broad ...

Star formation

Star formation is the process by which dense parts of molecular clouds collapse into a ball of plasma to form a star. As a branch of astronomy star formation includes the study of the interstellar medium and giant molecular clouds (GMC) as precursors to the star formation process and the study of young stellar objects and planet formation as its immediate products. Star formation theory, as well as accounting for the formation of a single star, must also account for the statistics of binary stars and the initial mass function.